


Both/And

by PerpetuaLilium



Category: Code Name Verity Series - Elizabeth Wein
Genre: Canon Compliant, Every character after the first three is only mentioned; sorry!, F/F, F/M, Gossiping about your old concentration camp forewoman over Indian food, Jamie kind of comes in for a hard time in this but I do see him as a good loyal husband I promise, Post-War, Psychological processing via literature, Sixties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-20 17:20:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13151352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerpetuaLilium/pseuds/PerpetuaLilium
Summary: A quarter of a century after the war, Maddie Brodatt thinks back to that December night, and gets by with a little help from her friends.





	Both/And

**Author's Note:**

> I do ship Julie/Maddie and Róża/Rose but in this fic the tags don't refer to anything super aboveboard or overt, just to questions that Maddie is asking herself about her own past feelings and about her friends.

_December 1969_

“I’m surprised you’re reading that book. Are you enjoying it?”

Maddie looked up from her copy of _Le rançon des instants._ “I am,” she said, a little quizzically. She wasn’t quite sure why Dympna would be questioning it. She was the only person from those days—the days before the best and worst of times—whom she really talked to any more, not out of any desire to run from her prewar past but because Dympna was wildly unlike Beryl or the others in her ability to fly up to Aberdeen to visit whenever she liked. She tended not to question the ways in which Maddie had changed since before the war. In return, Maddie didn’t question Dympna’s own life, a lack of common sense disguised as lack of convention. And why should she? Dympna by all accounts was thriving. Her brother was in the House of Commons by way of Fleet Street; her husband, a wine merchant from Bristol whom she had met and married quickly in the waning days of the war, was by all accounts faithful, dutiful, and kind to her and to their children.

“It does surprise me that you’ve become such a Romilly fan,” drawled Dympna with an ironic waggle of her eyebrows.

“Why?” asked Maddie, with some trepidation. Now that her kids were out of the house she was not used to the sorts of unsolicited comments on her that she associated, primarily, with their snide, and snidely teenaged, friends. The friends were now also grown, and had mostly left the area, most of them for Edinburgh, one for London, one for, of all places, San Francisco.

“She’s _very_ Continental and _very_ Catholic,” said Dympna. “Not exactly your type of writer at the best of times. It isn’t as if this decade or this generation have changed her very much either; she’s still the Lisette Romilly of 1945, not the one of 1925.”

“It helps me remember,” said Maddie. “I’m not the dabbest hand in literature, not as quick as study as…some people, but I can tell that there’s a lot of the victory in here. It’s a book about what one does with freedom. Younger people not liking Romilly’s answer to that doesn’t make it any less what it’s about.”

“And she does believe, doesn’t she, that there will be a much more comprehensive victory to come? Which you don’t believe.”

“Which I don’t believe. At the end of the world, yes,” said Maddie, a part of whose world, free and untrammeled, had already ended. “It helps to think of things coming back, don’t you think? You never know who you’ll meet in your dreams.”

~*~

Jamie, for twenty-five years and counting now, had well understood what Maddie needed to remember, how Maddie needed to think and feel. Was he, one might ask, eminently lovable, well worth being with for himself, the best of husbands and fathers, the key to a world that Maddie could never have imagined? Yes, she would answer, yes, of course.

Was he, one might also ask, the closest Maddie would ever get to Julie?

Yes, she would answer, yes, of course, and she would answer it without following through on what this might imply, without answering, as she had never answered and never aspired to answer, the ever-going question of how Julie had figured into her young and war-wracked heart. It wasn’t the sort of question that asked for an answer; it wasn’t the sort of question that needed or ought to need an answer.

The nightmares about that December night had stopped for a few years in the early fifties, then started up again, then stopped again shortly after Maddie’s fortieth birthday and not come back again so far. In their place were vague dreams, impressions and antics, little snippets of color and sound, orange wool and silver laughter. She remembered, idly, the first section of _Fantasia—Fantasia,_ that unknown and never-fulfilled fascination and desire of Rose’s own murdered friend, a link, now, somewhere deep in or deep underneath Maddie’s mind, between the two victims, the two tragedies. Being told that she had done the right thing had not made the nightmares stop; being told that she had done the right thing had not made these vaguer and sadder and better dreams start. Not much could, really; not much had any influence on where her mind wandered.

Julie crossed Maddie’s mind mostly in winter, on nights not quite like the night on which she had died, nights peaceful and quiet except for the wind howling over the heather and blasting down from the mountains. The peace and quiet that was not peace and quiet reminded her of that violence, the violence that had been, as it were, an act of love.

She had actually met Lisette Romilly once, at a party that Rose gave to celebrate her fifth year as a practicing surgeon, and had wanted, unaccountably, to say what she had done to that still-weary woman with her still-frantic eyes, not as a challenge or as an apology but as an uncomfortably transactional way of extracting somebody’s forgiveness. Not believing in God had proven a wonderful way of impelling her to take people she knew to be pious and treat them as authorities, as forgivers, as justifiers, in God’s stead. She had written once that if she believed in God it would be in a God of vengeful judgment. Loving kindness, then, must be a human, all-too-human trait.

Julie crossed Maddie’s mind in winter and when Jamie would ask, in moments of uncertainty, that she walk through, once again, that formula of theirs. He was himself, but not unequal to his sister. They said that had been Louis XIV’s motto. Another too-Continental, too-Catholic crudescence in her mind. _Nec pluribus impar. Not unequal to many._ Jamie was Julie’s equal, in one way too many, or, thinking from the other end of the problem, in one way not enough. _Nec pluribus impar._ An American novel that they had read to their children had told them, talking about the ruthless conformity of a science-fictional world, “alike and equal are not the same thing”. And she too, she knew, in thinking as she did, in becoming who she had, was not unequal to Julie.

This would be another Romilly problem, this question of being oneself and being one’s dead beloved, being too much and being not enough. Maddie had not read _À la fois_ , the novel for which Romilly had won the Prix Villon, but she knew that Rose’s friend Róża had. Róża had found it “clarifying” about some issue in her own life, some aspect of the life that she had living in that apartment with Rose, the apartment that they had shared for, by Maddie’s count, twenty-two years now and would probably still be sharing twenty-two years down the road. (The Lutheran community in Edinburgh seemed, based on what Maddie knew of the city, like it would not be the most robust in the world, but Rose had told her that she did find it a bit of a comfort to immerse herself in when Róża would go off on a tear of deeply embittered and highly Catholic-specific blasphemy. In a letter from about five years ago Rose had said something that had stuck with Maddie ever since. She had said that almost everybody eventually healed, but that not everybody could be asked to do so at the same pace. Maybe that was why, recently, the more Maddie healed the closer she felt to that intolerable moment.)

~*~

“Anna Engel’s in jail again,” Rose said to her the next time she visited Edinburgh. They talked over lunch at an Indian restaurant that had opened up recently; Jamie had remarked a little while ago that the _Empire Windrush_ had been the best thing to happen to Britain since the Abdication, a remark with which the Julie constantly flickering and shifting and fleeing through the heather like David Balfour behind his eyes had made herself more overt than she had been for Maddie didn’t know how long.

“Oh,” said Maddie.

“Not because of anything she did in Ravensbrück,” said Rose. “She slapped a Member of the Bundestag.”

“I hope they don’t keep her in for too long,” said Maddie.

“I’m sure they won’t,” said Rose. “Not at her age, not with how respected she is in the CDU.”

“It’s so dratted hard, isn’t it, to imagine a world in which people go to prison for all those things and only those things which people ought to?”

“I’d rather only than all,” said Rose.

“I’d rather both than neither,” said Maddie. “By the by, how is Róża?”

“Unwell,” said Rose. “But, well, the other doctors say she should be better in a few weeks. And she’s putting a brave face on it. I think back to twenty-five years ago and how there was no gentleness then, no gentleness to her bravery, how she was only gentle when she didn’t think that she could be brave.” Based on Maddie’s memories of Rose’s Ravensbrück diary, she was not sure that she thought that this was an entirely fair way to describe Róża, but Rose knew Róża better so Maddie felt no desire or place to question it.

There were other questions that Maddie wanted to ask Rose— _Are you and Róża queer? Do you ever dream of Karolina? When you dream of Karolina, do you feel worse when you wake up or better?—_ but each of them would be more improper and imprudent to ask than the last, and none of them would tell Maddie what she really wanted to know, which was a whole host, a whole stable, a whole raft (take whatever metaphor, infantry, cavalry, navy), of questions and answers about herself, her own life. It was a funny sort of happiness, a funny sort of happy ending, that could not be destroyed even by asking these questions, but that might be transformed and changed in nature absolutely and terrifyingly if they were asked. She imagined Rose or Róża posing these questions, or similar questions, to her. She would have no way to avoid answering them then. She would not excuse herself. She would not be that afraid. It was probably more reasonable to wonder if Róża might ask these sorts of questions than Rose, even though, or perhaps because, Róża did not know Maddie nearly as well as Rose did.

They had a conversation about another science-fiction novel that Maddie had read recently. This one was for grown-ups and she had had to force herself to read it, on the recommendation of an American associate of Dympna’s husband’s, because it had been about things far too close to home. The associate of Dympna’s husband had _known_ that it was about things far too close to home, but he had recommended it anyway, which Maddie had definitely thought was cheeky of him once she had started reading it. In this book there had been a line that had stuck in Maddie’s mind. It went: _“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only_ appears _to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.”_

Maddie did not think of herself as a “silly” person—many things, retiring, often uncertain, a little fearful, but not silly—but she was willing to edit, to take little nips out of, her understanding of herself if she had to. She did not always enjoy it, but she was willing. For this, though, she might reject this idea from this book, and think instead back to the days in which Vera Lynn had told them, in a tone of secularized, certainly not specifically Godly certainty, that someday they would meet again. “Someday,” for Maddie, was, without Romilly’s specifics or this Vonnegut character’s stoicism, oftentimes almost enough. She had also heard it said that the past was a different country. She did enjoy traveling abroad.

Julie's form began, at last, to become definite, far more definite, in Maddie's dreaming eye.

**Author's Note:**

> I imagine postwar Lisette's literary persona as a turbocharged Catholic fixated on the problem of human moral freedom--sort of a cross between Flannery O'Connor and François Mauriac. I made every effort to respect Maddie's Jewish background and canonically non-religious worldview in my depiction of her thoughts on Lisette's work. The titles of Lisette's novels mentioned in the text, respectively, mean "The Ransom of Instants" and "Both at a Time". The "Prix Villon" is not a real prize.
> 
> The science fiction novels that Maddie thinks about are "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Slaughterhouse-five."


End file.
